After having lived in New York for almost a decade I expected a hard adjustment to a smaller Minneapolis scene when I moved back three years ago. But it became quickly apparent that the Minneapolis/St. Paul comics scene was nothing to sneeze at. In fact, the Twin Cities really are one of the great comics places in the US. Anyway, I’m sure I missed a lot of people in my report, so feel free to point them out! Heck, if you think you can do a better & more exhaustive Mpls/St. Paul report go for it! And Let me know when/if you do it. Actually, wouldn’t it great if there was a sort of ‘annual report’ that summed up the comics scene every year? I’d love to see something like it. Check out my effort out if you haven’t already.

As part of the report I was also going to do a MIX 2011 report, but things got wordy and I’m sure Frank appreciates that I didn’t include it in the piece. Instead I was going to detail my impressions on this blog. However, in the meantime, cartoonist Dustin Harbin wrote a great exhaustive report on the eXpo. He pretty much nailed it. Instead of wasting more pixels on yet another report, you should all just read his. I really appreciate his honest take. From my local perspective it was a great show. An amazing array of guests (Koyama Press! Adhouse! Top Shelf! Jim Rugg! Dustin Harbin! Ander Nilsen! Sarah Glidden! Julia Wertz! John Porcellino! Mike Dawson! Eamon Espy! Jon Lewis! Karen Sneider! Robyn Chapman! Rina Ayuyang! David Huyck! Microcosm! + more!) arrived and seemed to have a great time. I made decent money, but it’s hard not to do that at you local show when you don’t have travel expenses to contend with. My main concern was with the out of town guests. I really wanted them to do well, have a great time and come back in the future. I hope they will. Kudos to Sarah Morean for pulling off a great show. Check out Dustin’s report. Oh and I uploaded all my MIX pics to Flicker if anyone cares.

All books are available again. The shortages that happened due to the Brooklyn Festival and the holidays are a thing of the past. Anyone who has been waiting to get their books: Thank You! You should be getting them very soon.

The Uncivilized Books site had a small update. It now has a blog run by Adalbert Arcane (pictured above).

I meant to post this sooner but various things conspired to prevent it. This is just a brief note that new comics are now available on the Uncivilized Books site. All of these debuted at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival and are now available for purchase via the magic of the interwebs:

Diary is the follow up to Gabrielle Bell’s acclaimed L.A. Diary. This pamphlet continues Gabrielle’s autobiographical project with stories set in Minneapolis, New York and California. The star of the book is ‘Manifestation’, Gabrielle’s ‘adaptation’ of the notorious Scum Manifesto. Tom Kaczynski contributes a one-page introductory comic.

KLAGEN: A HORROR briefly considers the movements and practices of the death cult which has silently infiltrated every level of society throughout our world. Drawn in dirty gray and black, it sheds no more light than is prudent and gives no false hope. One closes this small book feeling that although we live in God’s house, God has not been home for a long, long time.

The long awaited fourth part of the well received Trans series of books (which includes Trans-Alaska, Trans-Siberia and Trans-Atlantis). The cartoon journey through philosophy, pop-culture, politics and the occult arrives at its destination: Utopia…

On Sunday I’ll be part of a panel titled Developing Iconographies. Here’s the brief from SPX programming:

Sunday, Sept 12, 2:30 | White Flint Amphitheater

Distinct from drawing as an art discipline with its own self-ratifying purpose, artists in comics create pictures as part of a visual language. Moderator Ken Parille will investigate the ways in which comics artists develop visual iconographies in individual works and throughout bodies of work. Cartoonists Eamon Espey, Kevin Huizenga, and Tom Kaczynski will participate in this discussion, illustrated with slides of the artists’ work.

The discussion should spirited, I hope all of you out there come and ask some problematic questions!

But what would SPX be without the comics. I’m happy to announce that my micro-publishing venture, Uncivilized Books, has once again teamed up with Gabrielle Bell to produce another mini-collection of her acclaimed diary comics:

The book includes her diaries set in Minneapolis, California & New York. The star of the book is Manifestation, Gabrielle’s ‘adaptation’ of the notorious Scum Manifesto. I also contributed a short comic-intro. We’ll have copies of L.A. Diary as well.

Another recent Uncivilized Books production will be on hand: The Petrified Catalogue by Dan Wieken. The book debuted at MIX last month, and this is the first time it’ll be available outside of Minneapolis/St. Paul.

Last, but not least, I’ll have my usual assortment of comics along with Structures 1-11, a collection of architectural drawings that are part of my research for a future story:

As I worked on my comics education series of posts (one, two, three, four, five, six), Isaac Cates generously consented to answer a few questions I had regarding comics in the English Department. Isaac is currently an English Lecturer at the University of Vermont and has taught many classes on the Graphic Novel (as well as many other topics including Poetry). He is also the co-editor (with Ken Parille) of Daniel Clowes: Conversations and has contributed an essay to the recent The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing Is a Way of Thinking. He’s also a cartoonist and some of his work can be seen on his blog.

My questions were pretty general as I’m just trying to get at a broad view of comics in the English Department. Isaac’s thoughtful answers sparked a lot ideas and many further questions. Maybe we’ll do something more in depth in the future?

Isaac Cates: I don’t know of other “big name” cartoonists who have come through English departments, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find a fair number of English majors in the cohort or “generation” of cartoonists attending small-press conventions nowadays. Do we know what Sarah Glidden majored in, for example? (For that matter, what was Kevin Huizenga’s major? Or Jon Lewis’s? Or do those guys have degrees? I honestly don’t know.)

But there’s a reason (which I’ll get to) why more cartoonists would do the art major than the English major, even in colleges where the Art Department frowns on cartooning and comics. (Don’t know why that’s the attitude in so many art departments; Picasso and Goya were both kick-ass cartoonists.) But let me address other questions first …

TK: Do you know anything about the history of comics in English departments? When did they start to get studied seriously?

IC: There are a smattering of serious review-essays from earlier in the 20th century (a lot of them collected in Arguing Comics), but those are mainly written outside the academy as appreciations, with different goals from those of scholarly criticism. Academic criticism on comics in America seems to begin roughly around the time that people start writing about Maus. For me, an early landmark book is Rusty Witek’s Comic Books as History (1989). Other people wrote about comics before Witek, of course, but he was one of the first to write about them in the same way you’d write about a novel or a poem, and not merely as products of a particular cultural moment. The real boom in writing about comics happened after the turn of the millennium, I think.

But as far as “when did people start teaching courses on comics”—I’m not totally sure. I was under the impression that not many people were doing it in 2001 when I taught my first comics seminar, and certainly there were fewer books to put on the syllabus back then. But it must vary a lot from school to school. I might have got my idea that comics in the English Department was a new thing because I was in a fairly conservative department at the time. I should say, though, that I never had trouble getting a course approved: every department I’ve worked in seemed to understand that there was a real body of writing there that needed to be taught.

TK: From my (very narrow) experience in CSCL (Cultural Studies and Comparitive Lit) and English classes at the U of M in the 90’s, comics were quite welcome as objects of study, or even as a format for delivering assignments. What has your experience with that been?

IC: I never saw a comic book on a syllabus as an undergrad, but I wasn’t seeking them out. I imagine someone was teaching Maus even back then, and the second volume came out while I was in college. I will say, though, that I increasingly see comics on syllabi that aren’t dedicated to comics—someone teaching Fun Home in a gender studies class, or Blankets in a course on the contemporary novel. I think that’s something that has really changed in the past decade, or maybe the past fifteen years.

TK: Can you describe the type of students that attend your classes? Cartoonists? Comics curious? Writers? Readers? Etc.

IC: The first time I taught comics, several of the students in the class were hard-core comics readers and went on to produce comics of their own. (I think four of the students in an eighteen-person seminar self-published mini-comics later. One of them, Shawn Cheng, is still doing it quite successfully.) Since then, the percentage of would-be cartoonists seems to be dropping, mostly because there are a lot of other students interested in taking a course on the graphic novel. The comics-curious and the devoted graphic-novel readers are diluting the numbers of cartoonists, would-be cartoonists, or superhero fans: the pool of interested students gets larger and larger as the graphic novel gets a firmer purchase on the ordinary student’s college and pre-college readerly awareness.

More on the budding cartoonist in a second.

TK: How much do you focus on comics writing as opposed to the art in your classes? Other classes? How do students deal with the fact that some ‘writing’ is done without words?

IC: I don’t know what other teachers do, though I imagine there are quite a few English profs who talk about characters and story and text without “close reading” the visual aspects of the book, whether those visual aspects are layout, storytelling, or drawing. Actually, part of what I’m trying to accomplish with the book I’m writing for Yale is a sort of “how to read comics carefully as comics”: starting to see how decisions about visual storytelling affect the reading experience.

But yeah, I spend a lot of time talking about things like layout, perspective, the interrelation of text and image, drawing style, cross-hatching, and so forth. Probably it bores some of my students, but I think for most of them it makes them conscious of a layer of intentional meaning that they were receiving at best unconsciously before. I think it’s important to make them aware of stuff like perspective, which can influence the reading of a panel very subtly, for the same reasons I want poetry students to be aware of things like meter and etymology. In that way, I’m lucky to have some cartooning experience, though I mainly started cartooning so I could figure out how to talk about comics in this way.

TK: What are some of the essential comics you guys study? Does it change a lot year to year?

IC: I don’t know what goes in the “canon” for other people, but I know I have never done a course without Maus, Understanding Comics, Ghost World, something by Chris Ware, and something by Will Eisner. I used to insist on Jimmy Corrigan, but I’m experimenting to find a Chris Ware book that every student will actually finish. (Jimmy Corrigan is tough, and long, and it always comes at a difficult point in the semester.) I can report that Quimby the Mouse is not that book. I used to always teach To the Heart of the Storm, but lately I’ve switched to Contract With God, so I can show students the “first” “graphic novel.”

And now that it’s published, I will probably never do a class without Fun Home. Maybe more than any other graphic novel, that one begs to be read in the English department.

I have to change the syllabus a bit from year to year because things don’t stay in print. I love teaching [Posy Simmonds’] Gemma Bovery, for example, but I switched to Tamara Drewe for the fall because for some reason Gemma is out of print. Also, Tarama Drewe has a movie adaptation coming out, and that’ll make for some interesting conversation, I suppose.

And I try to swap a few things out here and there to keep my own teaching fresh. Probably I’ll try teaching [David Mazzucchelli’s] Asterios Polyp once it’s out in paper. I’m teaching Jason Lutes’s Berlin for the first time this semester, finally lifting my self-imposed ban on teaching isolated parts of larger projects.

TK: What are the essential texts on comics criticism you use?

IC: Other than Understanding Comics, I don’t use criticism in the classroom much. Maybe that’s a shortcoming on my part, but I don’t use much criticism in my other literature courses, either. I’d rather keep the experience of the students focused on the “primary” reading, rather than secondary materials and tertiary arguments, if that makes sense.

And what I do with Understanding Comics has grown more and more contentious over the years. Now I think I’m mainly going to assign parts of it in order to get the students to argue against McCloud, to get them thinking about navigating their own answers to the questions he raises. (“What defines comics?” “What is the essential thing that makes comics work?” “What goes on between panels?” “Why do we like cartoons?” “What is art?” Well, probably not that last one.)

TK: Feel free to add anything else that you think is relevant.

IC: Okay, here’s something I’ve been thinking about lately:

English departments are getting more and more comfortable having courses in which we study comics the way we do in other literature courses. And many English departments also have creative-writing courses, in which students write short stories or poems or non-fiction essays that approximate the creative work they’re reading in their other courses. I wonder whether anyone has taught a creative writing course on making comics, within the English department.

Or, rather, I wonder whether it’s been done more than twice in college English departments. Matt Madden did a “creative writing: comics” in the Yale Summer Programs, when I was organizing creative writing for them, and I did it myself once at Long Island University. There’s no reason why it couldn’t be done more, except that most English Departments don’t have cartoonists working for them and wouldn’t hire a cartoonist for this purpose. I actually think that many English departments would be more amenable to teaching comics-making than most Art departments.

That’s one change that would probably make a big difference in the direction of comics in the coming generations, don’t you think? On the other hand, if creative writing courses did for comics what they’ve done for poetry in America, making them more insular, more professional, and more “academic” in the worst senses of that word, then I’d rather not start walking down that road.

Maybe the ideal thing in college would be a two-course sequence (or even a simultaneous two-course “block”) that had someone in the English department teaching story structure and storytelling, and someone in the art department teaching figure drawing, perspective, inking technique, and so forth. I’m not trying to suggest that everything about cartooning is the province of the English department, but I would certainly want to challenge anyone who thought it all belonged in the art department.

Today I want to talk about comics in areas of study other than Art and specialized comics programs. English, Cultural Studies, and other programs have since the 90’s started to integrate the study of comics into the curriculum. When Art Spiegelman’s Maus was awarded the Pulitzer 1992 most rationales to ignore comics in the academy melted away. A year later Scott McCloud built on Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art and released Understanding Comics. Whether you agree with McCloud’s thesis or not, the book quickly became a staple text for the academic world. It created a common language for talking and writing about comics. It was the perfect comics 101 text.

In my college experience (mid 90’s) I’ve taken many courses in the English and Cultural Studies departments. In both cases comics as object of study, or comics formatted assignments were welcomed with curiosity and open minds. My professors mostly didn’t have the critical apparatus to evaluate these projects, but at minimum they were interested in the medium. Almost all of them were at least somewhat familiar with Marshall McLuhan’s work. McLuhan famously included comic-books as an example of a ‘cool’ medium (meaning a low-definition medium requiring more conscious reader participation) in his pioneering book on media theory Understanding Media (1964).

Scott McCloud built on McLuhan’s media centric view, and introduced his own hot-to-cool continuum that was comics specific.

Of course, McCloud’s title Understanding Comics is a direct reference to McLuhan’s book. It’s an association that I’m sure helped open doors to the academy and cemented the book’s place as an essential text on comics.

Another potential reason for this relatively generous reception from literary academia resulted from the ‘comics as literature’ model that was dominant from the late 80’s to the present. The work of prominent cartoonists that emerged from that era: The Hernandez Brothers, Daniel Clowes, Adrian Tomine, Chris Ware, Seth, Chester Brown, Charles Burns and many others fits the literary approach (though, of course, not always and not entirely). This work was championed by The Comics Journal and it was this quality that was recognized by the Pulitzer Prize when it was awarded to Spiegelman’s Maus. While all of these creators are no slouches in the art department, they all create works that are story driven and deal with many traditional literary concerns.

I want to briefly focus on Adrian Tomine. Adrian earned a degree in English from the University of California in the 90’s. (I wonder if Clowes’ Art School Confidential was in any way part of his decision to not go the art school route?) I can’t locate my TCJ interview with Adrian, but if I remember correctly, at that time he was concerned with learning solid storytelling. He felt he could learn more from say, Raymond Carver, than the average comic-book on the stands. Comics to him were a storytelling medium. Art, though clearly important, was subordinate to storytelling. That attitude is understandable. At the time Adrian attended school, well written comics were a minority (and still are). I’d be curious to know if Adrian he ever brought comics into the classroom and created comics as assignments.

This ‘literary’ component of comics is something that is often overlooked in comics education. The vast majority of comic-books are still stories that people read. But most schools (that I’m aware of) that taught comics focused on the art side of the equation. Students were taught the grammar of comics, clarity of layout, transitions, or simply how to draw or use the correct tools. But the quality of storytelling that was told using these techniques was often an afterthought. Courses on comics as object of study (as literature) have also been proliferating, but courses on comics writing are still relatively rare. This has begun to change since the turn of the century and it’s something I’ll go over in my next couple of posts.

I’ll be at the Minneapolis Indie eXpo tomorrow (Saturday, August 21, 9-5). I’m camped out at table 50 with St. Paul artist Dan Wieken and a couple of out of town guests Jon Lewis and Karen Sneider.

Uncivilized Books will debuting two new books during the show. First up is Dan Wieken’s The Petrified Catalogue (pictured above). Dan’s extremely detailed images of decayed and petrified remains of real and imaginary creatures has to be seen to be believed. Here are a few pictures that fail do justice to his drawings. This books needs to experienced in person:

The other book debuting is Structures 1-11. It’s a book of drawings (by me) of imaginary structures. Regulars on this blog may be familiar with some of the imagery. Just check out the ‘structure’ tags on this blog:

uncivilizr: We take a short break from our Kickstarter (only 3 days left!) to alert you to a fantastic close reading of Roman Muradov’s Jacob Bladders and The State of the Art on Biblioklept: “But also cartooning, also comix here—Muradov’s jutting anarchic tangles, often recoiling from the panel proper, recall George Herriman’s seminal anarcho-strip Krazy […]

mrstsk: 1. I’m reading Ted Morgan’s William Burroughs biography Literary Outlaw just now and finding it very interesting. In many ways Burroughs was a terrible person — a bum, a killer, a political reactionary, a trustafarian endlessly calling on his parents to bail him out of trouble — but Morgan shows how he was actually […]

Musnet: The Mouse of Monet Mus Leaps Into Action at a moment's notice! He's an orphan. He's a hard worker. He loves to paint! uncivilizr: Meet Musnet, the hero of Musnet: The Mouse of Monet. Our Mus is brave, and leaps into action. He’s an orphan. He works hard. He loves to paint. Check out […]

uncivilizr: We’ve been asked: How do you pronounce Musnet’s name? Here’s the answer! Follow Musnet’s adventures in his book series from our fresh ODOD Books imprint for young readers. Now on Kickstarter: http://kck.st/2gdTm6P ! I made this cute little video for Musnet: The Mouse of Monet, a series of kids comics for my Odod Books imprint. We […]

Caitlin Skaalrud’s Houses of the Holy was reviewed on Comics Alliance, where John Parker writes that “Houses Of The Holy might be the most dazzling and immersive book I’ve read in a long, long time.” He continues: Houses Of The Holy is one of those books that’s difficult to summarize in a satisfying way. It’s a metaphysical exploration of ephemeral emotions, more reliant […]

The Guardian named Musnet: The Mouse of Monet by Kickliy as one of the most anticipated graphic novels of the year! Check it out! We’re honored! Musnet is the inaugural book in our brand new imprint for kids: Odod Books! More on both Musnet & Odod very soon. Follow us on twitter: @ododbooks // for […]